German police find five dead children in house

BERLIN (Reuters) - Five children between the ages of three and nine were found dead in a house in the northern German village of Darry on Wednesday, police said.

Their 31-year-old mother has been detained on suspicion of involvement in the "violent" deaths of the children and has been placed in psychiatric care, a police statement said.

"Based on preliminary investigation the motive appears to be a psychiatric illness of the woman," police in the northern city of Kiel said.

Police said they were still investigating and declined to make any further comment. Darry, a town of 450 residents, is 40 km (25 miles) east of Kiel, near the Baltic Sea.

The mother had turned herself into police, the NDR 1 Welle Nord radio network reported, saying the victims were five boys and that she had drugged them before suffocating them with plastic bags.

Teachers at the local school had notified the youth welfare office about the run-down appearance of two of the boys, who had come to school without coats, Spiegel Online reported.

It said workers from the local youth welfare office planned to visit the family on Wednesday.

In a separate crime earlier on Wednesday in another part of Germany, police said they found a third corpse of an infant girl wrapped in a plastic bag on the balcony of a 28-year-old woman arrested last week.

Police in the eastern town of Plauen said the woman said she gave birth to the girls in February 2002, January 2004 and September 2005, and that they had died suddenly.

The bodies of two other girls were found in a suitcase and a freezer. The woman was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter.

A police spokesman said the woman, who has two other children aged one and seven, denied killing the girls.

Police began investigating when the girl born in 2002 did not report for school registration. They found her corpse in a suitcase stored in a basement. They found the second corpse in a freezer before making Wednesday's discovery.

The cases follows the starvation death of a 5-year-old girl last month in the eastern town of Schwerin.

Also, in 2006, a woman was jailed for 15 years for killing her eight newborn babies. The remains of the babies were found wrapped in plastic bags and buried in flower pots, buckets and a fish tank on her property.

(Writing by Erik Kirschbaum; editing by Philippa Fletcher)